What I discovered when I stopped trying to transcend my humanity
“The phenomenal world appears fluid and insubstantial, transparent to the light of Awareness. There is no center, only infinite context. Awareness is the infinite context of all existence, itself neither identical with nor different from it.”
I was sitting in a Zoom circle of 147 “advanced” spiritual students, listening to yet another participant casually claim their latest transcendent breakthrough, and the familiar rage was building in my chest.
This was an advanced consciousness course for students who’d already completed many levels of spiritual training. We were supposedly the cream of the enlightenment crop.
The teacher had turned ineffable spiritual experiences into the most ridiculous left-brained categorization system I’d ever encountered: “Background spaciousness vs. Foreground spaciousness.” “All pervading emptiness vs. Radical emptiness.” “Interpenetrating awareness vs. Localized awareness.”
I can see now he’d taken “the map is not the territory” to such an extreme, he’d essentially created a new self-referential territory made entirely of maps!
No matter how absurdly convoluted these descriptions became, someone would nod with serene confidence and say, “Oh absolutely, I experience this all the time.”
And there I was, the apparent spiritual failure in a room full of enlightened beings, desperately thinking: What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I access these amazing states everyone else seems to slip into so effortlessly?
I’d spent decades seeking these transcendent states through meditation retreats, spiritual workshops, consciousness-expanding books, and a month in an ashram in India. All trying to rise above this messy, biological, human experience to reach some pure realm of exalted awareness.
And there I sat, listening to spiritual jargon sounding increasingly meaningless, feeling more separate and broken than when I’d started seeking.
Finally, I reached the breaking point.
I got so fed up I literally didn’t care anymore. I stopped trying to understand. Stopped trying to match my internal experience to their verbal descriptions. Stopped caring whether I was spiritually advanced or hopelessly behind.
The Making of a Seeker
Looking back, I can see this desperate spiritual seeking wasn’t just because I had a natural philosophical bent toward seeking the ultimate answers. It was actually a trauma response.
Growing up with a narcissistic mother means being treated as an extension of someone else rather than acknowledged as your own person. Your job isn’t to be yourself. It’s to regulate her emotions, meet her needs, and reflect back her desired image.
There is no “you” in this equation. Only what she needs you to reflect back to her at any given moment.
My mother required me to be precociously mature, intellectually impressive, and completely focused on her wellbeing from a very young age. I learned from the beginning of life my natural childlike needs, emotions, and desires were inconvenient disruptions to her experience.
So for survival I split myself in two: the very few acceptable parts that kept her happy, and the remaining unacceptable parts needing to be hidden, changed, or eliminated entirely.
By the time I reached adulthood, this pattern was so deeply embedded I didn’t even recognize it. I just knew something was fundamentally wrong with me, and if I could just figure out how to fix it, I’d finally be worthy of love and belonging.
This narcissistic wound created the perfect psychological trap: it drove me to desperately seek spiritual states to finally feel worthy, but it also ensured I could never claim to have found them. After all, if I was fundamentally wrong about everything else, how could I possibly be accessing the exalted states the teachers described and other students so confidently claimed? A dirty double-bind!
The 45-Year Fix-It Project
So I spent four and a half decades basically trying to heal from the inconvenience of being human.
I read all the self-help books. Mapped my personality with the Enneagram, the Gene Keys, and Human Design. Journaled intensively. Walked on hot coals with Tony Robbins.
I tried parts work, attachment theory, shamanic journeying, holotropic breathwork. Stayed in an ashram in India and prayed in the inner sanctum of many temples. Took Ayahuasca. Ate magic mushrooms. Thirty years of talk therapy.
I dove into every spiritual method I could find: the Headless Way, Pure Consciousness Experience techniques, group awareness exercises, direct inquiry practices, Ascension, noting, umpteen varieties of meditation. Each promised to be the key to unlocking the transcendent states seeming to elude me.
The underlying message was usually the same: Your current experience, your emotions, reactions, physicality, messy human responses, these are the problem.
Rise above them. Edit them. Change them. Transcend them. Reframe them. Become something purer, cleaner, more evolved.
The problem was, no matter how hard I tried, the fundamental feeling of wrongness never disappeared. In many cases, like the infuriating Zoom course, it actually got much worse. Each new practice promised to be THE thing finally fixing me, and when it didn’t, I felt more broken than ever before.
Most Seekers Are Trying to Heal from Being Human
And I wasn’t really alone in this impossible project. Millions of people struggle with similar variations of the I-need-to-fix-myself addiction.
It seems to me almost all personal development and spiritual traditions carry the same underlying assumption. Your natural human experience is the problem and the solution is to become something other than what you are.
The messaging is rarely so direct, of course. It comes disguised as wisdom: “Observe your anxiety without identifying with it.” “Respond rather than react.” “Rise above your physical desires.” “Evolved beings don’t get triggered.” “Conscious people don’t need external validation.”
Each teaching subtly reinforces the same core belief: you are simply not okay as you are. As if our humanity itself is a disease requiring a sophisticated treatment.
But that day in the Zoom circle, something shifted deep inside me.
The Moment Everything Shifted
Sitting there watching those people casually claim access to states I’d been chasing for nearly five decades, I finally snapped.
Not in a traumatic way. More like how a fever finally breaks.
I simply stopped trying to have the “right” spiritual experience. Stopped analyzing my consciousness. Stopped measuring my internal awareness against anyone else’s verbal descriptions.
I just let myself be exactly as I was in the moment: tired, frustrated, and completely over the whole transcendence project.
This surrender, not to some higher state, but to my actual present experience, changed everything.
For the first time since childhood, I wasn’t trying to be anywhere other than where I was. I wasn’t trying to feel anything other than what I felt. I wasn’t trying to be someone else.
And in the radical acceptance of my completely ordinary human experience, something extraordinary happened.
I felt… peaceful. Whole. Complete.
Not because I’d transcended anything, but because I’d finally given up the exhausting project of trying to transcend everything.
The Cosmic Joke
A year or so later, I stumbled across some research about the human microbiome that made me laugh out loud.
Scientists have discovered our bodies contain roughly 38 trillion bacterial cells alongside our 30 trillion human cells. We’re not individuals at all. We’re collaborative ecosystems.
These bacteria don’t just hitchhike along for the ride. They help create what we experience as “our” thoughts, emotions, and decisions. They produce 90% of the body’s serotonin, the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of peace and wellbeing. They manufacture dopamine, GABA, and other chemicals influencing our moods, cravings, and sense of reward.
I’d spent nearly 50 years seeking unity and interconnection by trying to transcend my individual self. Meanwhile, my body was already living as the ultimate collaboration.
I’d been looking for transcendence when what I actually was, a walking collaboration of trillions of beings, was already more interconnected and unified than anything my spiritual seeking could have possibly imagined.
Life On The Other Side of Seeking
These days, I don’t do formal spiritual practices anymore. That’s because I no longer see any aspect of life as more or less spiritual than any other. It’s all simultaneously sacred and mundane, exalted and ordinary.
Living as awake and attentive as I can be in each moment IS my practice. I simply follow moment-to-moment inspiration when it arises. I honor my physical needs without apology. When challenges surface, I let whatever feelings emerge and trust the next obvious step will reveal itself.
Do I still get lost in my thoughts? Absolutely. Do I sometimes believe the wildly inaccurate stories my mind tells me? Of course.
But I no longer expect to reach some finish line where those things won’t ever happen. It’s just part of being human, and I’ve learned to take my thoughts with a whole bag of salt. I know they’re not any ultimate truth. They’re just something humans experience — believing them is entirely optional.
The voice that used to tell me I needed to transcend my human nature? I recognize it now as the echo of my mother’s rejection of who I naturally was.
And for the first time in 45 years, I’m finally okay with who I’ve always been.
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p.s. A couple of years after that Zoom call, I had a very powerful mushroom journey. I fully experienced what could only be called ‘no self’. That was truly the end of the last remaining trace of my spiritual FOMO. I came to recognize that what I experienced during that journey was absolutely the same as what I had experienced many times before in both meditation and yoga nidra, only significantly magnified. I realize now that in fact I HAD experienced the states those convoluted descriptions were so feebly trying to describe. But with the setup of always being wrong and always seeking, there was no way my mind would have ever let me claim them.
If this story sounds familiar, you might enjoy The Freeflow Rebellion — my e-letters to fellow humans who are tired of trying to transcend themselves.
